It was a steep learning curve, and I embraced all aspects of it, as shown by the media coverage opposite.
At first-hand, I experienced the consequences of high rates of unemployment, teenage pregnancies, low literacy rates, family violence and, of course, local authority high-density housing. It was immersion therapy: stepping over dirty nappies in shared entrance areas to blocks of flats: retching at urine in hallways; dodging used needles on the roadside; and listening to sirens to know which street to avoid. Not all of Matson was shabby and dangerous, of course. For every smelly high-rise apartment block corridor, I’d find a pocket of well-manicured rose gardens reflecting an immense sense of pride. Even the underdog had its underdogs!
On my delivery runs, I soon discovered a very cool time-sharing and skill-sharing program called Fair Shares. Fair Shares is still an active initiative in Gloucester. It describes itself as two-way volunteering, whereby its members get rewarded for the time and effort they put into their neighbourhood. And Fair Shares was a great help to me in a community development sense, as I tried to make sense of what I was experiencing. While I was skipping along delivering The Matson News, I met a woman with several problems that needed urgent attention. Nellie told me that she was lonely and anxious. Several jobs around her place had fallen into disrepair, and she couldn’t afford to hire anyone to help her. Fair Shares came to the rescue for both of us. We did a trade. For every hour Nellie helped me delivering The Matson News, she could bank an hour in her time bank to spend on ‘buying in’ someone to help her.
So, a local man would give an hour of his time to mow her lawn and use the hour he earned to pay for a babysitter for an hour. The babysitter could use the hour they had earned to buy some mentoring from a local maths tutor. The maths tutor could get her lawn mown… and so on. With this simple concept, the economy of time suddenly created a level playing field. And got stuff done!
I am a huge fan of the concept of living in a circular economy – these days hosting guests in a converted shed on our private property via Airbnb; ride sharing with Uber; reducing consumerism from fast fashion through my thrift shopping addiction; and delighting in concepts such as Little Libraries, where my children regularly take and replace books in random roadside locations! A circular economy approach to life strengthens connection and communities.
As these community-led, sharing approaches grow and prosper, I predict that unless there are radical changes, governments will continue to move further away from having genuine connections and relationships with the communities they serve, and those communities will become more underdog in their activities. A different approach is needed. One that includes embracing communities through more community immersion, and fewer layers of bureaucracy, which at present simply stifle communities.
Conversation Starters
WHO is the underdog in your work or in your life? What’s your relationship like with them? How do you react to them, physically and emotionally?
WHAT kind of community engagement could you achieve with a budget of just $50? You don’t always need big budgets to engage a community. The next time you find yourself saying, ‘There’s no budget’, consider how you might reframe the situation. What can we do with what we have? What resources can we draw on?
WHY is it so important to genuinely involve people in activities in their neighbourhoods? And why is it so important that we avoid doing everything for them?
WHEN did you last wander around the community in which you live or work, with no purpose other than to become immersed in observing its happenings?
WHERE do you come from? How does this affect your perspective of community engagement?
3. Work from the bottom-up
The ear’s hearing something is not as good as the eye’s seeing it; the eye’s seeing it is not as good as the foot’s treading upon it; the foot’s treading upon it is not as good as the hands differentiating it.
― Chinese proverb⁸
After an incredibly enriching and motivating 12 months at the Matson Neighbourhood Project, I was looking for my next challenge. Not that opportunities did not continue in Matson (and the funding for my position was secure). It was time for me to move on. The day that I realised that I needed to leave was my first glimmer of my love for moving from project to project… I discovered something about my true nature: I never sit still for long.
And luck was with me. I found a new role within the local health promotion department as their Food & Health Projects Officer. I surprised myself and others, as I won this job over a qualified nutritionist. On paper, they appeared much more suited to preaching the do’s and don’ts of dietary requirements to the people of Gloucestershire. However, as with many things in the early 2000s, approaches to health promotion were changing. And fast!
I got the job because of my experiences in Matson. They were looking for someone who knew how to work together with people in finding health solutions, as opposed to expert-led solutions. That leads me to a story about soap. Back in the 1930s, if a public health message was that mothers needed to wash their children to prevent all sorts of doom and gloom and spread of various diseases, the health promotion people would simply deliver bars of soap to each household. That might seem like a very practical approach, but it had little educational value.
I imagined that nobody would have thought about whether mothers knew when to use the soap, how to use it properly, why soap was important for the health of their community, or what would happen when soap ran out. I also wondered who was going to pay for the ongoing use of the soap. Could the families even afford the soap? Nobody appeared to have considered the socio-economic circumstances of the family or household receiving the soap, or the effectiveness of these ‘paternalistic’ behaviour-change campaigns.
I began work in that department while their big yellow health promotion bus was travelling around communities across Gloucestershire providing all kinds of messages about health. There was so much to do. So, they’d progressed from giving out soap. Now health promotion was all about pamphlets and models of digestive tracts. But it was not working: this top-down, information-heavy approach to behaviour change. I found what seemed to be an assumption that if you gave someone the information on how to eat a healthy diet, they would embrace it. As anyone who’s ever attempted a healthier lifestyle knows, that isn’t necessarily the case!
So, as a young practitioner, I received the most amazing opportunity to apply a different lens to the age-old information-giving approach to health promotion. That approach focussed on the community at the centre of processes and initiatives to improve health.
My hometown of Gloucester is a relatively diverse city, with areas such as Barton Street (where I have many happy childhood memories of performing with my dance school at the local theatre) and Tredworth, said to be home for 45 different ethnic communities, with as many as 50 languages. I became involved in nutrition and health-promotion activities. And one of my projects aimed to improve the nutrition of the South Asian community. Statistics showed significant health inequalities, particularly around mortality and morbidity, compared to the broader population. Research also confirmed a range of likely influences on nutrition, including community and cultural norms, household income, as well as the availability and affordability of food, and more.
Pulling up in Barton Street in our big yellow bus was simply not going to work. Expert information-giving would backfire. So we searched for a more ‘bottom-up’ approach, flipping previous expert-led models of health promotion on their heads. We needed culturally sensitive interventions that would build on positive food practices and adopt both family-centred and community-centred approaches. My work began with a simple conversation with the right people. Simple as it seems, this time-honoured approach almost always works.
It’s